Hiking today in Zion National Park in southern Utah, I found myself staring up at peaks thousands of feet high, all made of tiny layers of sedimentary rock – Navajo Sandstone to be specific. Originally giant sand-dunes, the pressure eventually created sandstone, which was then eroded by the Virgin River that runs through the park.
The structures that remain are essentially hard-drives; they store massive amounts of information in the tiny, discreet unit of the sand grain. The information stored: the molecular differences in the sand grains, and the weather and atmospheric differences when that layer was formed.
Reminiscent of my recent post about Alistair Reynolds’ geological supercomputer.